Another factoid. Half of global CO₂ emissions in 1950 were from land-use change. That is not so long ago!
The declining share of land-use change in the total is not because the world ended deforestation, but coal, oil, & gas grew.
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CO₂ emissions from land-use change are incredibly uncertain. Uncertainty is 50% or more.
There are also definition issues in what is defined as anthropogenic (what is a carbon sink?).
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The good news, is that the Earth system has been able to clean up about half the CO₂ we have dumped in the atmosphere. The ocean takes up roughly 25% of our historical emissions and the land another 25%.
If global CO₂ emissions stay at net zero, either:
* All countries need to be net zero ~2050, or
* Rich countries have net negative emissions post-2050, allowing developing countries to emit longer post-2050.
"Instead of leaving such work to volunteers, global institutions should marshal the funding & expertise to collect crucial data, & mandate their publication"
💯agree with @_HannahRitchie. No one wants to fund the giant who's shoulders we stand on.
The approach to science is to fund big models, expensive observations, etc. All this is needed, but somehow science seems to have forgotten the importance careful curation & maintenance of data.
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Science is full of projects that improve models, do model comparisons, process some satellite data, etc, & if you are lucky there might be a task that scrapes together some data to feed the models.
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Scientific studies (eg IPCC Assessment Reports) generally consider CO₂ emissions from 'Net Conversions' as the emissions, while government reporting to the UNFCCC combines the conversions & sink (black line).
The 'sink' is not the total sink, only a part of the forest sink.